After I attended the HoloLens Academy at Build 2015, one question continues to come back in my head:

What would I do with a HoloLens “Dev Kit” ?

Well the HoloLens is about two things:

1. Bringing objects into the physical world and interact with them

2. Change the appearance of the physical world

There is still one more barrier that needs to crossed before we can have a true Star Trek HoloDesk experience – and thats the physical properties of the holograms. We cannot touch them, there is not tactile feedback from a Hologram. Next step would be to combine the HoloLens with with something like this:

The HoloLens can only project holograms in the sweetspot of our vision, so anything that need peripheral vision will not work. An example of that would be soccer, you don’t want to walk around looking at your feet with a HoloLens.

In many ways, you can compare the HoloLens introduction with the Nintendo Wii. There is going to be a few games (Like the Wii Play suite) to get users confortable with the HoloLens. I would love to make a paint throwing game for that:

Imaging a game, where you can throw “paint bombs” in your living room. Use the gaze to aim, perhaps even get a hologram laserpointer, and then use a voice command to throw the paint. That would be fun 🙂

Another “no-brainer” App would be Cortana – Imaging calling out the “Hey Cortana” and she materialize right in from of your, again in true Star Trek transporter style, and ask what she can help you with. That would be a very cool demo app.

When it comes to business apps, its more in the visualization department I see the HoloLens. If we ever wanted to add a cargo configurator to Glomaris that would be a fun place to add HoloLens support. Imaging your vessel and the different cargoes as a holograms, and you can start trying to see if the jigsaw can be solved. In Foqus Finance a car configurator (change colors, rims, etc.) could also be a HoloLens experience.

I have the www.3dmouthpieces.com website, where you can design mouthpieces for brass instruments. How about a HoloLens designer, where you can, in real-time, construct your mouthpieces. And the finally with a voice command “Print mouthpiece” – sends the model to your 3D printer !